Sunday, September 21, 2014

The Rat and the Spider

Just a quick update of this week of development. I'm working on adding enemies to the level. The sewer levels already have some interesting toxic waste, toxic bubbles, falling rocks and other vertical hazards that challenge the player to jump and progress through the level avoiding being hit. I have no horizontal hazards yet but I'll come out with something.

Enemies, on the other hand, are very complex game entities. They don't only challenge the player movement but their overall combat strategy. I've decided to start by the most simple enemies, in order to grow in complexity by small increments. And this leads me to the rat and the spider, our most basic sewer enemies.

The rat is controlled by a simple patrol script that moves the enemy between two points of the level. This patrolling behavior even thou may not sound very realistic for a rat, will be very useful for other enemies such as security guards, police officers, etc. Rats do not attack, they just flee from danger. Maybe if they saw you eat a fellow rat they flee much quicker. Of course, you can eat a rat to gain 1 blood point (I have no animation yet). Nosferatu vampires gain 2 blood points from rats. And Ventrue just can't feed from rats, they vomit the rat blood.

The spider also has a simplistic behaviour, it just goes up and down the spiderweb trying to catch the player in the process. If the spider touches the player, you lose 1 health point. As simple as that. Next week I'll add some AI behaviour for the basic enemies. Maybe the spider can crawl by the ceiling waiting to jump down to the player just as in Zelda 2. Also, I have to add some weapon to attack the spider. More to come soon.